


Don’t Bite The Hand That Feeds

by Mr_Crocodile



Series: On the shoulders of Titans [4]
Category: Godzilla - All Media Types, Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Violence, Gen, Guerrilla Warfare, Thailand, Vietnam
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:47:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27655709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mr_Crocodile/pseuds/Mr_Crocodile
Summary: A tale of a boy and his dog....Except... the dog isn't a dog.And the boy...
Series: On the shoulders of Titans [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1990825
Comments: 23
Kudos: 14





	1. Don't Bite The Hand That Feeds

**Author's Note:**

> According to my betas "Your heart might break reading this."  
> Have fun!!!

**11th of August,** **2017** **  
** **Nha Trang, Vietnam**

Duong Trang Baotixita’s family had been living in Nha Trang for as long as they could recall, and that was also how long they had owned the family restaurant. Of course, as generations had marched and times had changed, their focus had turned from serving their loyal customers in their neighbourhood to serving the most well known and sought after dishes European and American tourists were willing to pay hefty sums for.

Baoxita’s job (whenever he wasn’t in school of course) was to, as the family’s youngest, charm their clients into loosening their pockets. He wasn’t old enough to really understand the nuance to that, though. He really only understood that being respectful and friendly towards their patrons not only made his parents and said patrons happy, but was great fun too. It meant that, unless he had some homework or helping to do, he had free range to play around and hang out in the restaurant.

Which was precisely why he was in the cellar at the time. Since their house was on the building’s first floor, with the restaurant and kitchen occupying the ground floor, the building’s poorly illuminated cellar served both as storage for their business ( three large shelves packed to the brim with ingredients and extra chairs and tables in a corner) and their stuff. His ma had told him that she had left his football down there, and his friends had just passed by telling him that they were going to the nearby square to play a bunch. 

That conversation had been interrupted by a series of large trucks traversing their street. They were loud and had face-masked people inside them all over the crates they carried. Bauxtixita watched curiously as one of them in particular was manhandling something inside a sack. The man managed to firmly take hold of it and quickly shove it inside a wire cage. He briefly wondered what the man was doing, but then he remembered the football game he was going to be late for if he didn’t get moving.

Of course, when he heard rustling from behind a pile of boxes filled with whatnots, the thought of some football games or mysterious trucks completely disappeared from his mind. He had to _investigate_.

Just as he was kneeling and turning his neck to try looking between two larger boxes where he thought the noise had come from, he was startled by something hitting one of them from behind with enough strength to topple it and sent its contents (his oldest brother’s books from when he had been in medical school) sprawling across the floor. It surprised the young boy enough that he lost his balance and fell backwards. His backside hitthe rough cement floor.

And when he got back up again, he saw the culprit.

It was a lizard, albeit one the likes of which the young boy had never seen before. It was grey and the size of a cat and had only two large front limbs, with which it was constantly scraping and rubbing its conical head with. The body behind the shoulders looked more like a snake than a proper lizard, with no lower limbs and a long and constantly coiling tail. All in all, it was an animal unlike anything little Baotixita had ever seen before. And being the especially curious child he was, he of course got closer.

He had been taught since a very early age that snakes were bad news. 

_“But this wasn’t a snake was it? At most it was half-a-snake,”_ he thought to himself.

So he got closer until he could see why the small animal was writhing so much. There were 5 zip-ties tied around most of its conical, bone-white head like a hastily made muzzle, and from how many scratches it had made on itself trying to claw them off they had been on the animal for a while.

As he stepped closer, the animal finally realised it was being observed and completely froze, curling in on itself and trying to hiss through its bindings.

Baotixita, without putting much thought to it, walked up to one shelf in which he had seen scissors, grabbed them and walked back to the dark corner from which the animal had not yet moved.

“Here, let me help you?” He tried to emulate the comforting tone his ma had used when he had badly scraped his knee the previous month. In his mind he reasoned that it must have worked, because the animal didn’t make a fussor try to claw him while he grabbed it and started sniping the zip-ties. 

He thought to himself that it was very light, much lighter than any of their cats, and he could very easily see its skin hugging the ribs. 

“Don’t worry little Trang, we have loads of cat food… And if you don’t like that, we always have chickens in the big freezer upstairs and I’m sure no one will miss them!” The child gushed over the animal, excited that he now had, in practice, a _rong_ -like animal as a pet.

A few days later, while doing a daily run to feed the ever starving Trang, he discovered how the animal had arrived at his new home to begin with. Avery narrow (it was barelythe width of his leg) and scary looking tunnel just under a nook by the staircase.

###

**_3 months later_ **

Colonel Varuj had seen worse incidents before, on TV when he was still a kid, and even more brutal when he was trained. All in all, half a dozen wards in a not-that-big city were nothing compared to the slaughters that North Korea or New Delhi had been.

But he hadn’t been in North Korea or New Delhi. He was in Nha Trang, his first ever deployment in the field after a real Kaiju attack. A Kaiju attack _and_ an act of terrorism,he reminded himself. Most of the damage might have been done by the Skullcrawlers, but it had been one of the “Kaiju Cults” who had smuggled the newborn ravenous beasts to the mainland. It had been the Cultists who had fattened them until they were the size of cars, and it had been the Cultists who had been rounding up and executing survivors until the KDF forces had arrived to fight both terrorists and predators off or to the death.

And now, with the worst of it over, rescue operations and investigations had started. They had been woefully unprepared and uninformed about the attack. To the point that Varuj Benjamas had his men stationed in Saigon and had learned about the attack from social media before their superiors had even heard about it.

But now wasn’t the time to criticise the chain of command or the incompetence of local authorities. Now was the time to get to work, to find answers.

And exactly that laid before him: the biggest question.

The rubble before him looked no different from the thousand other ruined buildings in the city, but this one _was_ different. Helicopter footage had shown that, when three Skullcrawlers reached the area followed soon by two cultisty-filled vans, a fourth Skullcrawler had exploded out of said building.

Twice as big as the other ones, it had fought all three of them, killing one and maining the other two (of which his men had killed one and another squad was tracking the third on the city’s outskirts) and eaten all 20 cultists. Afterwards it had burrowed again, and was still unaccounted for.

Kaiju fighting each other was far from rare. But Kaiju of the same species? _Packhunting_ Kaiju of the same species? **_That_ **was unheard of.

On top of that, this one had appeared out of the underground in the middle of the city, unlike the other ones which had exploded out of a series of warehouses the cultists had been using to hide them.

His musingswere interrupted by Major Liao walking up to him and saluting.

“Sir,” The woman started. “There’s a cavity under the building, it’s a miracle it didn’t collapse before, it’s twice the size of the building itself.”

“Any survivors?” He inquired.

“No, and… Sir… The cavity is… filled with bones, animal bones from what we could tell, cat and chicken and dog, the kind of stuff that it could have hunted itself but… There’s also pork and cattle, butcher cuts sir.” She continued with worry in her eyes.

“So, that means they were feeding it.” It wasn’t a hard mystery to solve. It also explained why it was so much larger, while the other ones had been fed barely enough to keep them growing. This one had probably eaten as much as they could provide.

“Look into the owner’s records. If they were members of the Ramaraki, we need to know, and if they weren’t… We need to learn why in all hells they were doing this.”

“Yes sir. But, there’s one last issue.”

“What?” He asked curtly.

“Everyone who lived there as far as we know is accounted for, except… Sir, they had a 12 year old boy…

“Whereabouts unknown.”


	2. Don’t Wake The Dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five years after the Ramaraki carried out their brutal terrorist attacks on Eastern Vietnam, the jungles stare to rumble with the waking of dragons...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In what's hopefully an interesting twist to the formula, the newest instalment in this series comes in the form of a direct sequel to one of the prior installments!!

**28th of May,** **2022** **  
** **Sudsakorn Base, Chonburi Province, Kingdom of Thailand**

Varuj Benjamas, Colonel of the 8th “Darp Bhumibol” Infantry Regiment of the Kaiju Defense Force, liked to think of himself as a dignified and professional man, as was befitting of his rank. 

But he would not have faulted anyone for believing him to be an inexperienced rookie and not the colonel of the respected Bhumibol’s Swords regiment considering his current predicament, for he had spent the last half an hour running himself ragged trying to find his way inside the laberythic Sudsakorn Base command center. He had managed to lose his balance and fall on three separate occasions while making tight and unexpected turns and had tackled enough people that he was sure at least two of them had been of high enough rank to get him into trouble had he not just kept running.

The saying read “go slow to go fast” and he clearly wasn’t following it, so much so that by the time he _actually_ found his objective, General Loh’s office, his uniform was stained with sweat and his breathing so laborious that a dog’s panting would have been an apt comparison.

 _“Worth it.”_ He thought to himself as he awaited for permission to enter his superior’s office. 

“Sir!” He saluted in heavily accented english while he tried to calm his ragged breathing and heightened pulse.

“At ease Colonel. Considering what I’m guessing is this unexpected meeting's cause, I think a slight breach of protocol can be ignored.” The older man answered from his seat behind his large mahogany desk.

“Thank you sir… I’m assuming you’ve already seen the images and read the mission report?” Benjamas asked as he leant down with his hand on his knees, slowly calming his breathing as he went.

“I’m your General, _colonel_ , I was first to read the mission report, same as how I’ve read all of the intelligence reports and assessments on the original report, most of which you yourself don’t even have access to yet.” The man leant forward with his elbows resting on his desk and his hands folded together, his slight smile visible proof of the fact that he truly enjoyed poking fun at Benjamas.

 _“Oh fuck, I started with the worst possible question,”_ Varuj chastised himself.

“Then, Sir…” He tentatively started. “Will you finally allow for a large operation in the Annamite Range?” He tried to contain how hopeful he was.

“Well, I really can’t **not** order it, can I?” The man asked as he stood up and walked towards the large office’s window, the daily hustle of the enormous military complex a welcome sight. “Not now that we have bulletproof evidence of an active Skullcrawler population in Laos and Cambodia. I’ll soon be entering a call with local authorities to organize a joint operation.”

That made sense. Until then, the Ramaraki cultists in the region had been purely an internal issue, a terrorist militia that Laos and Vietnam (and Cambodia to a lesser degree) had been dealing with making use of their regular armed forces.

But now? Now they had proof that the Kaiju worshippers were maintaining, probably even _using,_ at least four Skullcrawlers to conduct their operations. Intelligence had suspected it for more than a year as it explained the vast underground networks and hideouts the Ramaraki had been using; Skullcrawlers were living drills.

But now they had footage and heat signatures, more than enough proof for the KDF, _for the Swords_ , to go hunting.

Except...  
  
“Sir-” Colonel Varuj started hurriedly asking, but his General beat him in that field too.

“Yes colonel, your men will be among those deployed, don’t think I have forgotten Nha Trang or you and your men’s… rather personal and earnest cause.”

The short and strongly built man didn’t even try to contain his smile. It was no secret in Sudsakorn that Varuj and his men as a whole were still raging to administer justice after the brutal attacks in Southeastern Vietnam five years before.

And Benjamas himself still held a particular victim close to his heart. Since they had never found the young boy’s body could have only meant one thing.

After all, it was well known Skullcrawlers weren’t particularly merciful or swift predators...

* * *

**6th of June, 2022** **  
** **Nghệ An Province, Vietnam**

At first, Varuj recalled from his personal puddle of blood on the jungle floor, the operation had been a resounding success. 

In a few days, all of the KDF units and regiments assigned to participate in the Dọn Dẹp Nghĩa Trang ( “Cemetery Cleanup” as he had been told by the Vietnamese) Operation had moved into position all along the Vietnamese-Laotian borders and linked up with their respective ground army and aerial partners. The 8th had been deployed in the Nghệ An province along with mountaineering and armoured KDF battalions and companies with extensive support from engineering and reconnaissance units courtesy of the People’s Army of Vietnam. And while many others were being deployed to help and bolster the locals put down the insurrection, they were being deployed with the main objective of hunting down and neutralising all Skullcrawler within the Ramaraki’s northern enclaves.

And at first, it had gone remarcably well, he thought to himself while he tried to ignore the pain streaming from the horrible, almost-eviscerating wound on his belly.

As they had suspected and prepared for, there had been five times as many Skullcrawlers as the ones they had detected. They had efficiently dealt with the creatures, none of the specimens they had encountered for the first few days had been large enough to make their rifles as useless as they would have been against larger Kaiju. And while the militias fighting alongside the bone-white creatures had created setbacks, these had also been dealt with effectively thanks to the airstrikes his men had called in from the Vietnamese Air Force.

But then, by the time they were so deep into the mountainous region that they were expecting to link up with the KDF forces on the Laotian side of the border within two days, things had started to change.

The militias had suddenly grown both more efficient, almost like real soldiers, and worse of all, more daring. No longer content with layered defenses and retreats, the Ramaraki had started staging ambushes and hunting for their patrols. But at the time Benjamas and his superiors had elected to simply continue through whichever path offered the least resistance. 

“We are not here to fight wackos!” He had told his men. “That’s a job for the Viets! We are in the business of hunting Kaiju gentlemen! And that we shall do!”

A trap, it had been a trap so simple that he had not even considered the possibility of it. The mere thought of the rebels using advanced tactics would have made him laugh if anyone had even proposed it to begin with.

So of course, when they entered just another Laotian mountain village nestled within a narrow and deep valley on the night of the 5th to camp for the night, they might as well have surrendered then and there, because describing what would go on to happen during sunrise on the 6th as a defeat would have been like describing the Soviet’s taking of Berlin as a “minor setback.”

That morning, he was woken up by his men’s cries of horror and fear. 

The rebels had infiltrated their camp.

In the confusion of the battle, surrounded by gunfire and the sounds, sights, and smells of burning houses and exploding grenades, he had fought and survived by the skin of his teeth thanks to drilled movements and honed instincts. So much so that from the entirety of it, his still foggy mind only remembered one thing. The Ramaraki were different.

These cultists had been abnormal, not even by their own twisted standards. Instead of the bone-white marking usual in their “uniforms” they had worn greens and muted whites. Perfectly camouflaged. 

Their equipment had been adorned with real bones. 

That confrontation, however, had been overshadowed by what had come next. 

A Skullcrawler unlike all the previous ones, while the ones they had downed until that point had been white and grey reptilian monsters the size of troop transports _at most_ , this one’s size had probably rivalled the original Ramarak’s size, its colossal forelimbs so large that a single claw had been almost Varuj’s height..

His men’s bullets had done nothing but reveal their positions to the green and bone-white carnivore.

As far as he knew, he was the last one left, for the few survivors had fled for the hills only to be methodically hunted down and slaughtered. By those metrics, he had been lucky.

After finding and dearming him, instead of being executed the cultists had brought him back to the beast, and more notably, _their leader_.

He had been forced to his knees, too tired to even try resisting, before the Kaiju’s enormous maw of hooked fangs. It lowered its head to allow a petite form holding a brutally hooked machete to drop to the ground.

The cultists had then knelt, forcing him to eat dirt. 

But when he managed to raise his head?

Sure, the facial structure had been that of a young woman, one who couldn’t even be of age, and the voice had been sharp and cold like a blade…

 _But he would have recognized those eyes anywhere._

Their file had been on his desk for half a decade after all.

She, _she_ , had only offered him a single phrase before running her blade through his belly’s skin, almost butchering him like a pig, and climbing back upon the beast’s armored head and taking her leave.

**_“Tell your kings and generals that King Rong is willing to accept their surrender.”_ **

Varuj had not really been aware of most of his surroundings after that (blood loss usually had that effect on men) but he did manage to momentarily regain his consciousness when a MEDEVAC helicopter found him, laying on the jungle floor in a puddle of his own blood and piss mixed with the mud.

“On the one hand,” He started muttering to himself with a delirious laugh, to the befuddlement of the field medic. “I did-I did manage to find my boy and my Skullcrawler… But on the othe-” His own bloody coughs interrupted him. “-ther they are no longer a boy and a Skull…” His bloody coughs stained the young medic even further until he fell unconscious.

It would have taken a miracle from him to even reach a field hospital alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, here's the [Link](https://forms.gle/sbMyGVk4fEM64oVq8) to the poll I will be using to decide what the next instalment of this series will be! This time the amount of option has been doubled because I can't stop myself from brainstorming new ideas >.<
> 
> I'm also happy to announce that I have started creating maps and other visual media for this alt-history setting, which you'll be able to see on my Tumblr and/or the Annex I'll soon be adding to this series!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the story and appreciate all and any kudos or comments you may be gracious enough to gift me! You can even suggest other possible settings and Kaiju in the comments ;)

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thanks for reading and suggestions for Kaiju ti be used in future stories are always welcome!  
> And also as always... I CRAVE COMMENTS


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